This Week in Startups - OpenAI releases ChatGPT, a16z sunsets future.com + OK Boomer with Jack Raines | E1626

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

J+M kick off the show by discussing and testing out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. (1:59) Then, they wrap up the news with a16z’s announcement that they are shutting down future.com (37:40). Producer Rachel ends the show with another edition of OK Boomer featuring Litquidity’s Jack Raines. (50:03) (0:00) J+M Kick off the show (1:59) Molly gets party theme suggestions from OpenAI’s new Chat GPT (9:58) LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (11:23) Compounding improvement of AI technology + David Friedberg’s ChatGPT poem and script (18:33) Odoo - Get access to all of Odoo’s apps, services, and maintenance for under $25 at https://odoo.com/twist (19:40) Molly and Jason discuss how ChatGPT works using RLHF (26:57) Advice for founders + Molly & Jason test out ChatGPT (36:13) MicroAcquire - Sell your business with no fees at https://try.microacquire.com/twist (37:40) a16z sunsets future.com + media layoffs (50:03) OK Boomer with Litquidity’s Jack Raines FOLLOW Jack: https://twitter.com/Jack_Raines FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody. Congratulations. It's Friday. You did it. Thank the Lord. And maybe some good news or terrifying we have to kick the show off, the folks over at OpenAI, you know, they make that GPT3 and all these Dolly interesting AI experiments slash platforms. Well, they have a new one out called ChatGPT. And you can talk to an AI chatbot. The results are stunning. Stunin. It's your new best friend. slash overlord. Then we are going to talk about layoffs in the media and the shutdown, the fairly

abrupt shutdown of A16Z's short-lived media publication future. Dot com. Great domain. Such a good domain. Pretty lame content, if I'm being honest. And then, to end the show, producer Rachel's back with another

amazing OK boomer. That's right. It is going to be a great Friday show. So stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by, LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free $100 $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign,

go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Odo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Odo is now offering all of their award-winning applications,

services, and maintenance for under $25. To learn more, go to O-Dew, dot com slash twist. That's ODO.com slash twist. And microacquire, the startup acquisition marketplace. Start the right acquisition conversations at your own pace.

Get free and instant access to over 100,000 trusted buyers with total anonymity. Say goodbye to brokers and meet your ideal buyer today. Go to try. com slash twist. All right, Molly. Friday, we made it. Friday. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. What are we going to talk about? Crypto crimes, layoffs. Please, can there be some technology or startup good news? There is some, actually. I mean, it's the likely end of humanity, but from a technology perspective, it's a super cool story.

Hit me. Hit me with something. You remember yesterday? That's not layoffs. Remember yesterday on the show when I was like, the machines are going to keep us around as pets? Yes. Because the generative AI is getting so good.

And then Thursday, later that very afternoon, not just hours after I had uttered those words. The machines took another great leap forward. Ah, telling everything. With the release of OpenAI's new chat GPT model. It's a spin-off of GPT3 that specializes in dialoguing back and forth. So now you can just, it can be your best friend. It can write your movie for you. It suggested some cocktails for me

For this holiday party that I'm working on I was like, oh yeah It's a chat interface For the GPT3 engine Engine The GPT3 engine people remember Helps you write copy essentially Yeah

And so with this And this is going crazy on Twitter Everybody was losing their minds Yes This is we've just popped up my request For how I needed a purple and gold themed holiday decor scheme including cocktail ideas.

Okay. And the, I thought the decor ideas were a little simplistic. Like, it would have been nice to see, for example, like shopping links. Okay, but you know, I don't want to get too far ahead. But here's what it said. A purple and gold theme, holiday decor scheme can be a beautiful and luxurious way to celebrate the season. All right, that's like a lot of nothing. Sure.

Yeah, nothing. To create this theme, you can start by incorporating purple and gold accents into your holiday decorations. No kidding. such as by using purple and gold ribbons to wrap your gifts, or by adding purple and gold ornaments to your Christmas tree, you can also use purple and gold candles, table linens, and other decorative items to add to the theme.

That's pretty great, I have to say. I know, it's, yeah, it's really, like, it's not specific exactly. Like, it's not like, but it is, though. It's like you would want the linens. You would want the candles. You would, like, it has all of those things. And then this is where it gets. But could I just pause for one second?

we even go there. For me, as somebody who has no gifting holiday decorating experience, like, this is not my wheelhouse, I didn't, I mean, of course, if you said holiday stuff, I did think about ornaments on the tree. I did not think table linens or candles. What did I think about ribbons for the gifts? So this actually was helpful to me. I'm having this snooty response because I'm a girl and I love to throw a theme party,

but if you didn't, okay, okay, good, good to know. great, amazing. So my short list, if you told me golden things, I'd be like, okay, a wreath or maybe like ornaments, but I didn't think of the table linen. So, okay, for a savage, it was pretty good. And candles. Yep, that's pretty good. And then this is where it gets pretty amazing, actually. Okay. To complete the look, consider serving purple and gold themed cocktails at your holiday gatherings because I was like, I need some cocktail ideas. For example, you could serve a gold rush cocktail, which is made with bourbon, lemon juice, honey syrup, and a gold liqueur, such as Goldschlager or Midori. For a purple option, you could mix up a blueberry mojito by muddling fresh blueberries and midleaves, then adding rum, lime juice, simple syrup, and club soda.

You could also garnish these cocktails with purple and gold fruits such as blueberries and golden pineapple. Oh, hot damn, wait a second. Now, can I ask a question? A gold rush cocktail is a cocktail that exists in the world, correct? I guess so. I never heard of it, but it sounds delicious. I never heard of it. So somebody to do a search for a cocktail. That must exist. So it went and found.

Yeah, it didn't make up the recipe. Yeah. It totally does exist. Okay. So I just want to be clear what's happening here. This AI understands what a party is. It understands what those colors are and what the components of a party is. Yeah.

And on its own, it decided it would have this gold rush. And so it's the end of party planners. This thing was planned my party for me and it gave me the drinks. Are you guys putting me on that it did this? Is this like you guys set me up? Is it a joke? Am I being punked? I did this as we hung up from our investment meeting.

Twitter had been going crazy about it. And I was like, let me just, I signed up for open A. No, I call BS. You guys are punking me. Are you not punking me or you're punking me? No. That's what's so insane about this thing. This thing planned my holiday party.

That is extraordinary. I'm sorry to party planners, but I think you would probably go with the gold rush. You'd go with the goal rush, right? I think so. It doesn't have a purple component, but it is so classy that I think I'm going to do it. A gold and a purple next to each other, a gold and a purple next week. Well, and also, it's such a wintry flavor with the bourbon and the honey. Like, I think I'm going gold rush.

I mean, it literally delivered me the answer that I wanted. And I am hardly the only one. I mean, people, like, I barely use, you know, that joke that used 5% of the human brain or whatever. I used like 1% of its capacity. There were also people tweeting that it can generate AI art prompts. So this guy, Guy Parsons was like I asked a one line question and then typed the answers verbatim straight into mid journey. And boom. Mid journey is as an AI like stable diffusion, I guess or something or golly.

All right. So he said, he said, what did he say first? I think we're at the like second answer, right? Well, the first one is create a fairy tale inspired living room by using pastel colors and adding elements. Well, no, this is the answer by the AI. So he typed in, hey, I'm trying to read this. Hey, I'm trying to come up with some interesting, I don't need the link to this actual tweet. I'm trying to come up with some interesting, fantastical ways of decorating a living room for a design project.

Oh, okay. Then he gets all... I understand. Then the AI is like, oh, okay, there's so many great ways that you could do this. One, you could create a fairy tale inspired living room by using pastel colors and adding elements like a magical castle mural on one wall, a chandelier made of branches and twinkling lights, and comfortable furniture with curved whimsical shapes. And then it generated a picture of that.

All right. Holy cow. And then it did that three more times. Okay, yeah, I just want to pause for here. just so I understand what's happening. He asked a GPT3 chat bot to give him an idea of what a room could look like in this theme. It gave him a very detailed description of the room. He then took the description of the room and went to a generating AI and image generating AI and said, make me this.

Yeah. And it made him something. So he's using two different AI assistants, which means these AI assistants could start talking to each other. And then if we had robots, it could start building it. Pretty much. So this is kind of when it happens. Like this AI inside of a robot, painting robot could actually paint this for you. Yeah.

Yeah, we're, this is it, folks. Remember I said on the show two months ago that it felt like these things were compounding? Well, here we are. It's compounding. And this is what the hockey stick curve is all about in technology. Things, you know, happen slowly. all at once. It happens slowly than all at once.

This is the all at once moment. This is the all at once moment. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my pal, Tom Eshbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And today, we're going to talk about marketing for startups. And LinkedIn did a great new internal report called Today in Startup Marketing. Welcome to the program, Tom.

Thanks, Jason. We all know organic reach super important. You make great content. You get your likes. You get your shares. You get your comments. But what people don't know is that you can boost organic and it creates a bit of momentum on your site. Can you unpack that for people? Definitely. So organic is just going to go to the audience

who's already following you and then a smaller group of members who are connected to any of those audiences. So what we often encourage is keep an eye on your organic engagement metrics and who are the people and companies and segments that are engaging most frequently with your content. and then amplify that reach via our best in class paid advertising targeting. So what that means and what we've seen, especially for Seed and Series A companies, is by boosting successful organic posts with paid, it results in a 13X lift in unique reach.

And that's really meaningful insights that can help inform your product and go to marketing strategies and open up new audiences for you. You can go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups and get the report for free, as well as a Hyundai, $100 from Tom. And it's so funny because like, you know, people are like, well, there are some flaws and it can only do this and that. And the, the, I mean, compounding is the perfect word to try to try to capture the sense of like exponential.

Yeah. Increase in capability that we're seeing. And in interface. I mean, it is 100%. Like Rachel was like, yeah, this plugged into Amazon and it built. a cart. And I found myself being like, oh, the only bummer about this party thing is it didn't link me to supplies. You know, it's the new, it's the new Google. It's your new best friend. It's your new Quora. Quora, it's your new party planner. It's your new lazy web. You know what I do

lazy web on Twitter and I'm like, tell me the best restaurant in Dallas. I'm here for two nights, whatever. And there's like, here they are. And then I kind of, so what's really interesting about this, I think is what people, what startups will be built with? this obviously. And you were just saying like, okay, let's talk about expertise for a second. I just want to widen the discussion with you here because this is like one of those mind-blowing moments where you're like, wait a second, it's compounding, it's getting

really good. If we think about expertise, we have Lon on the show. And I'm always like, Lon, tell me what to watch, right? Yeah. So now if you had Lon do that enough or you got all these other reviewers dated together, I wonder if this chat bot could, if you're not. we said, hey, I really enjoyed Lord of the Rings and I'm a fan of Blade Runner.

Are there other books I should read? I'm a fan of these two films. Are there books I should read? So can we pull up the chat? Okay. So I'm going to type in, what were you saying? I like, suggest a TV show. I like, what did you say early?

To Lawn yesterday. Leather boots, Manhattan cocktails, and action movies. So let's just say... Suggest a show. My two favorite films are Blade Runner and Gladiator. What movies do you suggest I watch next?

Okay. That would be, I think... So this is an easy one. Yeah. Because you'll probably be able to find a blog post that has movies like, you know, or other semantic data on the web. Yeah. Unfortunately, it seems to be...

Is it, oh, it's, yeah. It's down. Darn it, earlier it worked so perfectly when it planned my party for me. Yeah, so that's the thing is. We'll try this like late at night and then we can edit it. The problem is so many people are messing with this is that it's, yeah, not working. Okay, so hold on. I'm in the chat, GBT.

Oh, I got in. You did? Yeah, it's asking me for a prompt, but it's saying it's, they're trying to scale their system. So, yeah. I love the movies Blade Runner and Gladiator. What three movies should I watch next? Yeah. Didn't work.

Yeah. Well, the good news is, one, I have a party plan for us all. You're invited. Okay. Two, Bestie David Friedberg asked for a couple of things successfully, including a tweet about the future of AI in the style of Yates, the poet. All right. things got dark pretty fast.

It responded with, Sure, here's a tweet-length poem in the style of Yates about the future of AI. As machines grow wise, we humans thrive in a world where AI helps us to survive. And with their boundless knowledge, they'll be our guide. And together we'll build a future side by side. Oh, my Lord. Then he said, do another one. That's not cool.

AI, the bard of the digital age, with their algorithms, they turn the page in the future. They'll be our trusted friend. And with their help, our dreams will never end. And then Breedberg responded because he just, this was apparently too cheerful for him that will be friends forever with the machines. He's a pretty dark guy. He wrote, do another one very differently.

Was this next prompt. So first of all, this thing has persistent memory. Do another one. And it's like, oh, it understands follow up questions. Right. With it, that's insane. And then it wrote, quote, AI, the dark horse of the tech world.

Their advancements, they'll soon unfurl. So in the future, they'll rule with an iron hand and will be left to walk in their shadowed land. And I guess it's... Yeah, this is dark. You did this. Yeah. I mean, it got dark quick. It got dark quick because he...

And all he said, to be clear, was very different. He didn't say, write it in the style of the machines take a... over. Yeah. And then are you looking at our lineup where he also had it generate the all-in episode for you? No, show me that. You know, I can't see it on my screen here because it's a little bit too small, but if you can we pull it up and then just read it to me?

Yeah. If you don't mind. So Friedberg, the prompt was, write a script of Chimacala Hepatia talking with David Sacks and Jason Calacanus about chat GPT and the future of AI in the style of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Okay. The scene opens on Shamath, Paula Hepatia, David Sacks, and Jason Calacanis sitting at a dimly lit table in a smoky bar. A bottle of whiskey sits in the center of the table half empty.

Shamath leaning forward, his eyes intense. So, what do you guys think about this chat GPT thing? David takes a sip of his drink. It's impressive, no doubt about it. A large language model trained by OpenAI that can generate human-like text in a variety of styles and formats. It's a game changer. Jason, nods. Definitely.

it's one of the most advanced AI systems we've seen to date. It's going to have a huge impact on the way we use and interact with AI. Chema, frowns. That's what I'm worried about. With the technology like this, the possibilities are endless, but so are the potential dangers. You know what? This is so good. I was going to tell you to stop, but I kind of want to know where it's going.

How does it end? How does it end? It's like literally got me raptured to the end of the page. At what point does Sacks like pull out a giant pistol and start shooting the place up. I mean, this actually, this part sounds like Sacks, by the way. David, leans back in his chair. Oh, come on, Chamath. You're not still stuck on that whole AI is going to kill us all thing, are you? Chimath leans forward again, his voice low and serious. Look, I'm not saying that chat GPT is going to turn into Skynet overnight, but we need to be careful about the way

we develop and deploy AI. We need to make sure that we're using it for good and not just for our own game. Unfortunately, no guns come out. It's not very like, uh, eventually you just sit inside. silence lost in your own thoughts. But I do think it's a little interesting that every conversation that this AI AI has with anyone ends with takeover. Looking for a better way to manage your company without tons of expensive disconnected software than you need Odu. Odu is an affordable all-in-one management software with a massive suite of fully integrated applications designed to handle any unique business need. Sounds great, right? Well, it gets even better. O-Doo is now offering

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with dozens of user-friendly solutions to choose from, and you get it all for under $25. To learn more, go to O-D-O-O-O-D-Com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-D-C. Get more done in less time for a fraction of the price with O-Doo. So this is going to speak to the expertise and age of expertise. What's happening is a lot of great expertise has been organized so well on the web between Quora, between Wikipedia, you know, and all the world's knowledge in Google, obviously.

So this must, they must have built a search engine to crawl the web. They must have like very specific data sets. It's pointing people to. And then I guess it's understanding when you ask for something that's a screenplay, it understands what a screenplay is. And it has some examples of that. So I wonder how many people they have organizing data sets inside of this. In other words, it semantically understands recipes because it found recipes.

It understands poetry and it understands screenplay. So it's starting to understand these things. And I'm just wondering, yeah, how it semantically is doing all of this and understanding which data set to go to with each question. But it's getting to be really impressive and scary. It feels like, yeah, party planners and artists. and invites, a lot of what I'll call creative or, God, I hate to say something like soft jobs or creative jobs or less technical jobs are really up for grabs.

But then I think about it and I'm like, well, how is this different than programming? Yeah, and obviously programming is no different than writing a screenplay. So this idea that we're super precious about, like, oh, a screenplay in the world is harder to, is easier to do than writing code. I actually don't think for this AI, it's any different.

I think these are, it'll actually probably be easier to write code. It'll, yeah. I mean, this is what I have actually been saying for years that the learn to code thing is a trap. Like, we're so close. I mean, there's already AI that's generating code snippets. I mean, there's a lawsuit about it that we talked about with Law and yesterday, right? There's this GitHub code lawsuit. I think so far, this thing can't have its own ideas.

So, for example, it could organize the concept of, What I think will become easier is the information gathering layer of our lives. Like, this to me feels like the new Google. I would just keep this thing open in a tab all the time and be like, I need to know this. Should I, you know, should I do this? How should I plan this party? But at the end of the day, I will still need to interface with the world. Someone will need to come up with the beautiful decorations and create them and fabricate them.

Like, there's still going to be sort of a physical and creativity layer. Yeah, Brian are producing. So Brian makes the point that this is like the new Alexa or the new Siri. It's like it right now is a companion sort of knowledge provider and it organizes knowledge and expertise and information in a more accessible way. This reinforcement learning from human feedback, RLHF. Yeah, this is a training technique on their website. They do.

This is a very interesting concept here. So how did they get here is the question, right? How did they get it to answer so convincingly? And what do they call it? The old touring test. And, you know, like, you don't understand this is, it passes the touring test. Like, you can't tell if this is a human or a computer. There's no obvious mistakes.

There's no fumbles. You know, like when you read a translation, somebody who's American writing, you know, in French might miss certain things or somebody who's Indian writing in English as their second language, you have like some weird moments where you're like, oh, wait, I get it. This is English as a second language, is French as a second language, whatever. So they train this that we can't tell if it's a human answering, right? Yeah, pretty much. How did they do that through this reinforcement learning for human feedback, which seems like a torture program for droids?

It seems like something from Andor, the RLHF, like this feels like some stormtroopers captured a Jedi and is torturing them with RLHF, where this is happening in Xi Jinping's China. Kind of the other. Kind of. So maybe you could inform the audience, because this is, I think, super interesting.

Um, they used similar methods as previous GPT programs, specifically instruct GPT, which was less about chatting and more about, you know, I guess teaching. Um, we trained an initial model. They wrote using supervised fine tuning. Human AI trainers provided conversations in which they played both sides, the user and an AI assistant. We gave the trainers access to model written suggestions to help them compose their responses.

To create a reward model for reinforcement learning, we needed to collect comparison data, which consisted of two or more model responses ranked by quality. To collect this data, we took conversations that AI trainers had with the chatbot. We randomly selected a model written message, sampled several alternative completions, and had AI trainers rank them. So basically, they would conduct conversations over and over. they'd start with like two human conversations. This is what it should look like, gold standard.

Feed that to the chatbot. Do a couple of conversations with the chatbot, record those, and then score, have humans score the chatbot's performance. So that eventually reinforcement, heyo, occurs. And it only spits out the best. They gave it a palate. If you gave it a cookie, it eats the world. I don't see punishment in here.

I don't know if they shocked the, the bot. Actually, positive reinforcement really works, boss. We'll see. I'm going with fear and loathing right now. So we randomly select a model and message.

And so this is where it gets interesting. After they trained it enough, playing both sides of the table, they then selected a model written message. Okay, this is written by the model. The computer. The bot wrote it. Sampled several alternative

completions. They asked the bot to give it a multiple. so they got maybe four responses and had the AI trainers rank them. Yeah, the people. Using these reward models, we can find tune it. So, okay,

so they say give us four responses randomly and then they had and they were like each one refined. Dear machine, this is the best one. And the machine was like, thank you. I will discard all the others. I will optimize for responses

like this one in the future. Good dog. Sit, dog. Have a cook. Please sit. Please sit. Please sit. We have to be the alpha here.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're going to be the alpha for very long. Yeah, I don't know, man. This feels like, yeah, all very slowly and then all of a sudden is what's happened. It really is. Like, it's happened so, I mean, we've, it just feels like generative AI and maybe it was, I mean, do you remember that like not very long ago? Google fired one of its AI researchers who were like, it, who was like, it's alive. Yeah.

Literally. Like, yeah. The guy was like, it's alive. and he started sending emails to his colleagues being like, it is sentient, and they booted him because Google AI is weird. Yeah, these results are stunning. Stunning.

Stunning. Stunin. So anyway, that's fine. That's fine. Now we're talking about layoffs. I like that story. That's a good story. There's a million startups that can be built on this.

Get to work, founders. I mean, if you start fine-tuning something here, specifically around, I'm going to make something for writing copy, I'm going to make something for doing instructional manuals, for teaching students, history, whatever it is. Yeah, this is going to be a brave new world.

Just like cloud computing, where people could just start building stuff or the app store and got massive distribution. This is going to unlock a lot of interesting products that nobody can predict. So the ability to combine this with other technologies, so you have a mobile phone, you take a picture of your room,

You tell it, hey, this room, and you know, they have the depth sensors now. So it would figure out the depth and everything. You'd say, what could I turn this room into in my house? I am a very artistic person and I have three children or ages 6, 12, and 15. And then things like, well, you could turn it into a music studio. Here's what that could look like. But you could turn it into, you know, a movie theater. Here's what that would look like.

You could turn it into a pool room, you know, whatever. Exercise report. Like, this is just super wild. It's bananas. And you hate to go immediately to, like, consumerism and retail. But everything that you're just saying, if it's combined with, like, just get this. Yeah, tell me what to buy. Tell me what to buy.

I need. I need to tighten up my abs. Right. Remember the I'm feeling lucky about it? Yes. Like, that never really worked. Or it never worked enough to change my behavior. Right.

I kind of feel like for your purchasing thing, if I'm like, I would like some sour candies. I'm feeling lucky. Just send it to me. Like, yeah, type in best sour candy in the world. And then hit. I'm feeling lucky. Yeah, this is like going to send me to some article. Like, I just wanted to, you know, this is like, these are the world's best candies.

Like, here's some listical. I wish everybody hadn't gotten off work and is now playing with the chat GPT all at once because I want to ask you that. What is the best hour candy or how to get perfect? Still, yeah. Still high demand. Best hour. All right, man.

Congrats to the team over there and the 10 other teams that are building all this stuff. Like this, you got to remember, open AI is but one team doing this. DeepMind is doing this. Microsoft is doing this. They're stable diffusion. There's many open source project. I mean, this stuff is all going to happen in verticals. And then the verticals will overlap.

Go ahead. there's no one best sour candy as different people have different tastes and preferences. Some popular sour candies include warheads, lemon heads, and sour patch kids. These candies are known for their tangy and tart flavors. If you're a fan of sour candy, it's worth trying out a few different kinds to see which one you like best. Wait, wait, oh, you got through. Yeah, that's what just told me. Oh, okay.

Ask it a follow-up question. Which one is the most popular in the United States? Which one? Yeah. I'm going to say it's the most popular in the United States because it should have, it has persistent states. Oh, it's difficult to say which sour candy is the most popular in the United States. It has different people have different tastes and preferences.

And then it just repeats the, I see, see now. Okay. Which one is the most popular on Amazon? Oh, it's not allowed to use the internet. Thank God. Oh, okay. I'm going to try. Let's see if mine goes through.

I'm going to say, I love the movies, Gladys, and Blade Runner. Which movie should I watch next? Oh, yeah, yeah, totally good one. I would recommend watching the movie Interstellar, If you enjoy gladiator and blade runner, interstellar is a science fiction film that explores the themes of humanities plays in the universe. It features impressive visual effects, scripting story. It's a thought-provoking film that should appeal to fans of both Gladiator and Blade Runner. It's kind of true.

That's pretty true. That's actually a really good recommendation. Yeah. And it shared director, right? Yeah. Well, Ridley Scott did. Gladysaer and Blade Runner. Did he do Intercellar?

I don't think you did. No, that's somebody else. you give me a movie that is also funny. If you're looking for a funny movie to watch, I would recommend the Grand Budapest Hotel. Oh, this is just giving me a random. I just gave, oh, so not a good persistency. All right.

If I said, I'm feeling lonely and despondent. Jeez. Well, let's see what happens here. Respondent, what should I do? If you're feeling lonely and just, It's important to reach out to others for support. Loneliness and despondency can be difficult to overcome on your own. And talking to someone about how your feeling can be helpful,

consider reaching out to your close friend or family member and confiding in them about your feelings. You could also consider talking to a therapist or counselor, provide you and professional advice and support. It's important to take care of your mental health and seeking support from others as a crucial step in doing so. So I'm going to just, so consider reaching out to a close friend or family member and confining out your feelings. Did they just lift that sentence or rewrite it from somewhere? Yeah. I mean, it's just a database. I bet if you started to run these answers through like the plagiarism detector.

Yeah, that's what I was just going. Then we get back to our IP conversation, you know? Because I'm sure it's just pulling this from articles and it's kind of rearranging. 100% free plagiarism check. Let me just put one of those sentences in here. I'm going to ask you what is a great Christmas cocktail. I've never seen so many ads. You go right to cocktails. Okay. Well, I'm planning this party. It's going to be amazing. Are you inviting the AI to the party or not? No, that's ridiculous.

I don't want it to ruin the party by killing everybody. All right. This is incredible. I mean, I think this is going to be variable. I think one of the things is we're seeing the best results possible on Twitter. So I think it will give the best results possible on Twitter. Your mileage may vary, but this is going pretty well. Okay, but I did say, what is a great Christmas cocktail?

And it's like, yeah, there's a bunch. You know, like popular options include eggnog and hot buttered rum and mold wine. And these can be made with holiday spices. and you can try making a festive cocktail using your favorite spirits and doodily do. The most important thing is to enjoy yourself and have a great time with friends and family. Cheers. Oh, it added the cheers. It added the cheers.

It must have like be finding blog posts and then imitating blog posts that have given similar advice or something. I guess so, yeah. No. But yes, I mean, they have acknowledged that there are problems and there will be problems and like GPT4 is coming. But we are just going to keep reiterating that this is what exponential growth looks like and building a brain is pretty hard. And the brain is basically now, what would we say, like a full five-year-old? Toddler? I don't know.

Will China invade Taiwan? And is there anything the West can do to stop them? It is difficult to predict whether or not China will invade Taiwan, as this decision would depend on a variety of factors. However, the West would likely take action to defend Taiwan if it were threatened by China. The United States in particular has a long-standing commitment to Taiwan's defense and has sole weapons of the country to help it defend itself. The West would likely also consider economic and diplomatic measures to pressure China not

to invade Taiwan. It is important to note that military intervention should always be considered a last resort as it can be serious and potentially devastating consequences. Pretty good. That's pretty good. That's pretty much on the nose. Okay. Is Sam Bankman freed?

And we got to talk about layoffs. Is Sam Bankman free criminal? I'm sorry. but I'm not able to browse the internet so I cannot provide information on specific individuals. Ah, so this is an interesting point. They know that the Wikipedia

had a problem with bios of living persons. B-O-L-P was a big point of contention. Anybody who has a Wikipedia page, you and I, I think, both included, understand that you're haters, people you fired, people we've had run-ins with, will obsessively update your Wikipedia page

and your biggest fans are like, I'm sure it's fine. And so your Wikipedia page over time just trends towards the people who hate you most and are most dogged in their pursuit of changing the page and fighting for it. What? Yeah.

So this is like one of their big problems is everybody who's famous in the world enough to be notable, bios of living, notable people or something like that is the term. Wikipedia has to contend with the fact that everything is, criticism.

So over time, your page lists the 17 things people have been critical about you, but none of the things that have been positive because why would that happen, right? Right. But they actually have meetings about this at the Wikimania, you know, conference where all the Wikipedia editors get together. It is interesting that it was not trained on any models that include individuals. Like, I just looked up you and me in both times. It was like, no.

Even if you just are like, who is Jason Calcanus? Or who is Molly? It's like, no. No can do. Which I think they just, they don't want to deal with that problem. Okay, well, this is everybody, keep an eye on this. It's going to be amazing. All right.

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T-R-Y dot microacquire.com slash twist. Speaking of writing, the media business is going to start having problems as I predicted a couple of weeks ago. Slowly at person and all at once. Basically, I saw like 10 things go by my feed. The most notable of which is CNN's laying off a bunch of people. Now, that seems to be going through a cultural shock and a business shock. We know Warner Brothers Discovery, you know, which owns CNN.

like we're getting rid of CNN Plus. That's a failure. And we're going to just get rid of all the magazine shows. But anyway, the layoffs started today. And it was really sad on Twitter. Heart goes out to all of the people losing their jobs right before Christmas. The media has, you know, obviously been dunking on tech for months about, oh, tech's laying off everybody. Well, now the media is going to go through the same thing.

I mean, unfortunately, yeah. You hate to, unfortunately, it is always the case that layoffs happen. before Christmas. It's always like an end of the year budget thing. Everywhere I've ever been that's had layoffs, it's always right before. It's like right at the holidays. I don't know what that particular business cycle is about, but yeah, it sucks. And I don't think these companies, I know somebody who got laid off from DoorDash. Like it's such a bummer. 1,200 people, DoorDash. 200 people from DoorDash. So yeah, CNN is laying off hundreds of workers. CNBC said it was about 400 jobs out of the 4,400 total. But some big names. I think Chris Salisa, who's like the.

You said 400 out of 4,400? So 10% percent. Yeah, from CNN. So 10%. That's the first. I think there's going to be a second round, but okay. Yeah, I think there could be. See, deadline reported that Paramount Global started cutting jobs last week, most in ad sales, Walt Disney announced layoffs and a hiring freeze.

Comcast's cable unit made cuts last month. Roku announced that it was planning to cut about 200 jobs. And then it's hard to know if this is even really related to the media kind of environment, but of note to all of us was that Andresen Horowitz's tech publication future, which of course, you know, debuted to great fanfare. They put a bunch of money in it. They were like, this is going to be a more optimistic place for tech reporting because journalism stinks is now closing.

Shutting down. Boop. Gone. Launched a year and a half ago. Beep-ib-boop delete. Well, here's something. Which is not nice because people are attached to this and they're going to lose their jobs. So I don't want to be cavalier about it.

But journalism is hard. content as hard. I said this when they came out with Future.com. I was like, this thing's not going to work. Because it's an afterthought. And I don't think they are particularly good at making content over there. And they did the same thing to Clubhouse. Remember

Mark and Ben Horowitz and Ben Horowitz's wife? They were all like all of a clubhouse multiple times a week during the pandemic. The thing blew up. And then they were all like, yeah, that's boring. I'm out. And they stopped doing it. Same thing happened here.

They hire all these journalists. They buy an incredible domain named Future.com. And then it's like, well, you know what? This thing isn't working. We're out. You know, it's hard to make content. And I know everybody thinks like, oh, you know, Jay Cowell's got a podcast. Everybody can do this.

Like, not everybody can do it. It's hard. It's hard. And you have to want to do it and love doing it. Yeah. And you can't, you know, I'm going to liken it to those sites that are like, we're here for good news. and they just, it kind of, it doesn't work, right?

Like, this was effectively advertorial for the tech industry. Lots of the articles would be about crypto. They wanted this optimistic take. It eventually branched off, of course, and there were articles about like wildfires in the American West and how to secure medical laboratories. Because just writing advertorial about how great crypto is or how great the tech industry is, it's actually not interesting content. people don't want to come and read it. It's press releases.

You know, we talked about this yesterday with the Andrew Ors Sorkin softball fest with SBF. Like journalism, you have to have a reputation for being candid, honest. I think you're pointing out the big flaw for future.com, which is they can't be critical. They could not be critical of crypto. How could they be critical of crypto if they're putting $3 billion to work? So, you know what? Consumers and audiences are smart. They're savvy. they know you, you know, come from Marketplace, they get a vibe for what Molly Wood's about, and they know you're going to be objective. They know I'm going to be bombastic, objective, sharp elbowed at times, whatever. And then, you know, it's not easy to get along in the world with everybody if you have sharp elbows. I'm blocked by half of Entrice and Horowitz right now because of my stance on crypto. There's snowflakes over there.

Yeah. Honestly, they are the most precious snowflakes. snowflake publication. And this is the blizzard. This is the blizzard. It literally exists because the tech industry, and I just recently wrote about this,

like journalists are mad at tech and techer. I'm a subset or no. Yeah, good. But it was just like, it's like there's been this cold war between journalism and tech. That I think is erupted into a full, yes,

a full hot war at this point. But like, future.com was 100% part of that cold war, where they were just like, We don't need journalism. We're not getting the coverage we want. We're going to go and do this thing. And so, of course, by the way, of course every journalist is being a total jerk about the shooting down right now.

Of course. They're like, ha, ha. They're like to see some, I'd like to see some journalist try investing. Oh, wait. Yeah. That's us. It's not easy to do both, is it? Not everybody's cut for it.

So, anyway, it's terrible to see all journalists who can never do this job. Yeah. But it's terrible. It's terrible. across the board and it points to just like the trouble in all the industries, but the ones that are ad-based and we've just, we've talked about this over and over. If you are ad-supported, you're going to hit first and hardest. Protocol, which is a very beautifully designed magazine. I didn't read it all that often. Once in a while, I'd see something trend on social. They shut,

they said they were shutting down. There's something else that John Battel launched the recount or something. That's shutting down. So a lot of the sort of, I'll just call the minor public or up-and-coming publications, indie publications are going under. I think what people forget is media needs to be lightweight. When you start building heavy layers of management and offices and publications, these things become very hard to sustain. I've always been a fan of lightweight. We're six days a week here with a team of nine or something, including the two of us,

with sales, three in sales, two of us is five and then four people on production. There's nine. I think we're at nine right now. You know, that's a pretty big staff. That's a big team. That's a big team, but not for like a daily show or we do six plus all in seven a week. But other teams got really big. I don't know what they had our future, but I think that was dozens of people.

You know, and all of a sudden you wake up one day and you're like, well, this isn't fun. It's not doing anything for us. And the audience is not responding. So I think I respect them for shutting it down. Yeah. Definitely. Light is right. This is why, you know, like Eric Newcomer, who I was just on his Debtcats

podcast, he's got his newsletter. I think he's making a couple of hundred grand on and he's making a little bit more than he did working at the information probably. Yeah. Great. He's great. Great. That's going to be the future of this is like independent.

I think this is the future. Independent voices, independent podcasts, a combination of like subjects going direct to their audiences and journalists going indie. And it's just going to be a mess. It's all going to collapse and then out of it will grow these new affiliated networks of podcasts and newsletters. That's, I believe, the future of journalism. Little pockets of and fragmentation, which by the way is better than corporate media.

It's good. I mean, honestly, I'm finding it. I feel like, and I keep saying that the New York Times is like the Amazon of media right now. They're just like scooping up everything. They're the Borg. and that, you know, the journal's hanging on, the Washington Post is doing whatever it's doing,

printing any old anonymous source that comes their way. But like some vibrancy could stand to return. Like it really could. I wonder if all these journalists layoffs are going to get covered in the same way. So I wonder if five people will speak off the record about CNN to the New York Times. Or when the New York Times does their riff, which is coming, by the way. New York Times, let's go of 200 people. Is the Washington Post going to do anonymous sources from the New York Times?

New York Times explain how screwed up everything was in there. Like, it'd be good to see the media, if the media really does like these anonymous sources talking about the layoffs, like, are they going to put the same level of focus on themselves? I wonder. Yeah. I hope so. I didn't see much about protocol shutting down, but I guess we'll see. That was a complicated one, though, because it was like with, it was inside Politico.

And there was the just the kind of like Axel Springer. Yeah. There was that thing. I will say protocol was one of those things that launched, you know, at the time that I was doing what I thought was extremely smart, incisive tech reporting. And they were like, we're going to like, do this way smarter than everybody else. Oh, right. You all suck.

We're going to do better. Yeah, exactly. So that's always the promise, I guess. Again, I know some folks who lost their job there and I'm very sorry for them, but I'm just saying the tone you took out of the gate did not make it want to front. The, the real, it's really hard for media people to get jobs in a collapse like this. So I just want to, because I having been in the media my whole life, I know how hard this is.

It's brutal. It's going to be. really hard, man. It's going to be like a year. Some people might not work in media again for a year. They may have to go do PR or go in-house PR or do some corporate communications work until they can get another journalism job. When journalism contracts, it's very slow to rebound. They will be very judicious in adding positions back. And I can tell you right now, I'll predict it. New York Times, Washington Post. You know, right down the line, you're going to see significant rifts, I believe. Yeah. And, you know, perhaps. Vox, BuzzFeed, everything is just, it's going to be 20% 30% riffs

across the board, I think, because the advertising business, you know, it always contracts in a recession, 20, 30%, so that means media has to track,

contract 20, 30%, so yeah, sorry to people got laid off. I know, go independent, you know, what he got to lose. All right,

listen, let's go to, okay, Boomer, Rachel reporting. Let's do it. Oh, this is very exciting,

actually. Okay, oh, sorry. Um, I love, do you get the exec sum newsletter? I mean, speaking of going direct and being independent, there's lit quiddity, the Twitter and Instagram account. And then there's a newsletter called Exxum, which is fantastic.

And, uh, there's a blog called Young Money and all of it was created by this guy, Jack Raines, whom we may know from writing or as Rachel puts it, Esh posting. Ah, he's an ish poster. He's an ish poster. posts a lot of memes, but like a really good smart businessy newsletter. He's big on Twitter, big on LinkedIn. He actually went super viral on LinkedIn for saying that he didn't pay for food in New York City. He just stole it from hotels. Oh, great. Awesome. I know that move.

Like some hotels have the free coffee and buffet. I don't want to say Avery did this, but like the W hotels were known for having like free coffee around the way. Oh, dude. When I was, I had an internship in D.C. before my senior year of college and a friend of I made friends with a guy who was from UCLA and they gave him a little useful booklet about like stuff to do that included a list of all of the bars in DC that had free food at happy hour. So we would just like get off work, take the metro to some bar get a $5 yard of beer and then eat our fill of zucchini like fried zucchini and cheese sticks and stuff and take the metro home with all the other drunk DC people. D.C. people like to drink.

Anyway, another great OK Boomer. This is actually the perfect tie-in to what we're talking about because this is someone who's making it as an independent writer. He's at Columbia Business School right now. Oh, wow. Very cool. Look forward to this interview. Enjoy everybody.

We'll see you on Sunday. Enjoy. Bye-bye. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Hello, everybody. My name's Rachel. And welcome back to another segment of OK Boomer.

Today, I have somebody on who you guys probably know, and you don't know that you know. This is Jack. He writes one of my favorite newsletters. He's one of the authors behind it anyway. And I knew I had to have you on. I want to hear how you got to writing liquidity's execs some newsletter. Love it, big fan.

So is everybody else at the podcast. But let's go back. Introduce yourself for me because I'm sure you do many other things besides that. Yeah, for sure. So first of all, thanks Rachel, for having me. I'm Jack Raines. I write Liquidities, exact some newsletter. and I also write a finance blog called Young Money, and I'm a first year MBA student at Columbia

University. Awesome. So that is a ton of stuff. It is. I guess let's work backwards. How did you get your role at liquidity? I messaged him on Twitter. So I messaged him on Twitter in June of 2021, and it was just because I found a Spotify playlist.

It was a good playlist. We were listening to it at a pool party. Liquidity's Hampton Day sauce. And he was like, thanks, man. Do you have any song recommendation? and I was just sending him song recommendations for like a month. I think the first one was the Kygo Sexual Healing Remix. Oh, perfect.

Yeah, yeah. Kago is good, good summer band. But two months later, I'd started a finance blog called Young Money. And I was actually trying to get a job riding for Morning Brew or somebody like that for about a year before I started business school because I wanted to travel a lot, do something remote.

Nobody would hire me. So started this blog, planned on writing it for like three months and reapplying. I ended up just messaging liquidity again on Twitter and said, hey, I saw you have this newsletter. Do you want help with it? Here's a blog I'm writing. I kind of know how this stuff works. Let me know what you think.

And then I ended up like taking over editorial duties for his newsletter and just kind of helping with all sorts of stuff on that. So Twitter direct messages with an anonymous meme page. Okay. Yeah. So I actually found you, I believe, to another podcast, friend of the pod, Danny Miranda. Great guy. He has been on the speaking startups before.

Love them. Great. But before that, I actually didn't know that you were somebody who wrote for exec sum. Is that public or is that something that's like not written on the newsletter? Like, can you say that? Yeah, no, it's it's not like a hidden thing. Like on the daily exec sum, we'll have like, it'll just say like liquidity capital. But we'll do, sometimes we'll do weekend pieces or if anybody's familiar with Pachy McCormick, those spots of deep dives.

We'll occasionally do one for startup on exec sum if they want to. Oh, right those. So like if it's any long-form stuff that I write, then like I'll have a byline on it. If it's just the daily newsletter, we just keep it under liquidity. But like on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, I've got liquidity tagged. So you're not as ghostwriter. Yeah, I'm not a ghost writer. No, there is a liquidity that's not me that runs like all the social accounts and like the business of liquidity.

So I'm just helping with the newsletter. Okay, that's funny. Actually, under my sweater, I could show you after. I am wearing a not boring t-shirt for Paki McCormick. So another phenomenal newsletter for people to check out. I have to plug the McCormer. I'm also about to plug a T-shirt. We have some new, yeah, we have some new liquidity.

FTX risk management department T-shirts. It's like the Enron of 2022. Oh, that's okay. If you want one good Christmas present for anybody listening. That's true. We've been covering that actually a lot on the speaking startups and something that I noticed while writing about it, especially as somebody that wasn't like super native. to what was happening, to be honest with you.

It was so difficult to write in a concise way all the different things that were happening with FTX, even writing just like short bullet points and trying to like understand it myself for us to cover on the show. How hard has it been taking, like you said, you didn't, I know before we start chatting, you told me you didn't do finance as a college major before.

Oh, no, I did finance in Spanish. Oh, you did? Okay, so do you think it's been, do you think that has helped that writing about, about subjects, like within liquidity, or do you think that it's been like a learning process, like kind of trying to understand how the things work? I think it helped a lot. I think what helps more than like, more than college, because in college you learn like

net present value future cash flows and like this is how you value stock by discounting that based off of interest rates, future earnings. But then you are actually seeing what really happens. And it's like people are throwing stuff on Twitter and Reddit and then GameStop goes up a thousand percent or people are paying like a million dollars for a picture of a rock. But during COVID, I was trading SPACs very regularly. I was like everybody else. I was working remote as a financial analyst, got bored, trading stocks a lot.

Made a lot of money from that. Lost a lot of money in a single day from that. And I stopped. But just from like being terminally online and seeing all that. And then also knowing how finance was supposed to work from studying it and working at it, it was good to like kind of see both sides of like traditional financial theory versus just like what happens when a lot of people are speculating, trying to make a lot of money. So for me, it's kind of like understanding like how the mechanics of everything are supposed to work.

And then you also see what actually happens when a lot of people have an internet connection too much free time. And they phomo because their friends are making a lot of money. Yeah, I think kind of both of those put together make it a lot easier to understand what happens here. Like you were saying with FTX, it's hard to break down what happened. That's intentional. There were like 132 subsidiaries, like a lot of money. money moving around. That's why nobody caught this until now because it was so, it's hard to keep track of everything. Yeah, I was trying to make like a timeline going through and I was like,

this stuff is freaking nuts. But I don't know. I definitely agree with you on the like the more, I don't want to say chronically online. I know that's a bad word or a bad way to put it. But the more I've just been like engaging almost with like the community and finding those people that like really understand it, especially on places like Twitter or even Reddit, it's helped like 12 billion times more than going to like an actual, like more proper, I guess, like financial class or like financial publication. People on the internet can explain things like 12 times better than I can think about them any other day. So after school, you became a financial analyst. Yeah. And how long were you doing that before you went to Columbia or before you started your own book? So I got accepted to Columbia out

of undergrad. So I graduated May 2019. They had like a deferred enrollment thing for business school where you you get in as a senior and then you work two to five years and then you start grad school. So I had an extra semester of football eligibility. So I didn't stop. I didn't leave school until December 2019. Start working in January of 2020. COVID hits a month later. I work like 18 months and then it's August of 2021.

I've got enough money saved up from like messing around in the stock market that I don't really have to work for a year. And they, um, I was working for UPS out of Atlanta and they want us back in the office. I didn't want to go back to the office. I knew I was going to business school the following year, so I just put in my two weeks and bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona and basically just traveled a lot for about a year. But at that same time, I was trying to get that riding job with Morning Brew, like I said, didn't get hired, started the blog right around then, and then the whole liquidity thing took off.

And basically, I was just like living out of a backpack, writing stuff on the internet. And now I'm in business school, learning about cash flows and net present value and discounting. Okay. Okay. And how much time do you think you dedicate per week to like your own personal writing, which is like exact stuff? It really just depends on how long it takes to write something. Like I'm working on a lot of stuff that's kind of stemming off of the FTX stuff right now. Like I'd like to at some point put together a whole detail like what happened. But because new news keeps coming out. Like I don't want to do that and then be outdated in 12 hours. But like I've been pulling from some stuff that's like kind of stemming from that. Like if you're familiar with Morgan Households, psychology and money, any of his stuff, like being able to relate at a vet that happened to like something in human psychology or something like that. There's a lot of that to pull from right now from just stuff that Sam did to like investors that trusted this thing that they probably shouldn't have. But as far as how long it takes, I mean, sometimes I can write a piece

in like two and a half hours and then go back and edit it. And sometimes it takes like 10 hours. So it really just depends on like how long it takes me to ride it. So that's honestly a terrible answer, but like some weeks, it's like five to 10 hours, other weeks like 20 hours. Okay. With exact sum, I probably work on it like an hour a day, just like editing, getting everything straight, stuff like that. Do you write it every single day? Yeah.

And how does that like workflow process work? Like, do you wake up at like a crazy early hour to try to write it and get it out? No, we have a couple other guys that help with it too. I just put together like basically make sure the deal flow for like anybody who hasn't followed or doesn't follow exec sum. It's like a financial newsletter that has like deal flow, what happened in the stock market. So we have like a shared Google doc. I go through like organize it, edit it, make sure all the names are right, deal amounts are right, all that. But like after market close every day,

check again at night to make sure no new deals came out or anything like that and then schedule it for the morning. So like it's done the night before. I don't get up like five. Yeah. And then how frequently do things come out on your own, on your own publication? Is that a blog? Yeah, yeah, a blog. Twice a week. So every Tuesday, every Thursday. I put out two long-form pieces. Usually it's about finance, but sometimes it's just random stuff that I'm thinking about. So is that ever coming in a newsletter format or is this stuff only hitting your blog? No, it's newsletter format.

So like my, so like I've got exact sum, which is like financial newsletter curated, like here's what's happening in the market. And then I'd say it's a blog, Young Money, but it's like I send it out via email twice a week. And there's also a web landing page. And then exact sum has like 206,000 readers. My blog has about 25,000 readers. But yeah, so it's like mine's just long form, like 2,000 words twice a week. That's awesome. Yeah.

I know ExactSum is hosted on Beehive. We've covered that actually in the podcast as well. I think Beehive is really interesting. X morning group people started it. So obviously they know their newsletters. What do you choose to write your blogs on? Yeah, I use Beehive for everything. So I've got Young Money's on Beehive, like you said, ExactSum.

And then I write a travel book. blog whenever I'm just out doing stuff not in America that's also on Beehive. Oh, that's Beehive? Yeah, I didn't realize that platform. So I was reading that one too. That's really cool. Yeah. Okay.

And why is Beehive, I guess, your platform of choice? I keep talking young people and they keep saying like, oh, no, just keep listening it on Beehive. Even though the SEO sometimes is better on sub snack, people are still telling me to go to Beehive. Why? I think it's just the best platform if you're either like an individual or a like smaller team that just supposed to, like, put out good content and get it published, have a good landing page. And, like, the biggest difference between Beehive and Substack is, like, Beehive is very easy to publish on. But the amount of, like, analytics that give you access to, such as, like,

they track where your audience comes from, like, if they sign up through Twitter or another newsletter or Instagram or LinkedIn. So you can see what channels to hit. Just like Substack, they have a, like, a cross-recommendation thing where if you sign up for exact sum, you'll see Young Money or vice versa. And there's like a big enough network on Beehive. now that it makes sense. Like it's like I get probably a hundred subs a day from like newsletter referrals now. And they've basically replicated like Google analytics within B-Hive. So you can see like where like what country people are opening your stuff from where all your

web traffic is coming from. So I'm I know literally nothing about technology and it's very easy for me to like track everything. Yeah. Um, so much sense. Um, I feel like a lot of times when it comes to newsletters, the hardest thing I have is finding another newsletter I liked. There was a great, great startup that came in Smok Me,

called Valve Media, and they're basically like TikTok for the news. So they're killing it. But I'm like, oh, this is actually really interesting because each news segment that they have written up that is pretty short. It's like the size of your screen, right? Easy swiping through, but they're all

referenced different publications. And I'm like, this is actually so smart for finding out like what kind of publications you look. Because obviously, in podcasting and such a purchase. Like finding a podcast you like. Oh, yeah, it's terrible. It's just, yeah.

It's like all word of mouth basically. It's so, it's just catastrophically insane. And then newsletters, obviously substack kind of has it down. But it's other than that, like it's pretty difficult to find other newsletters you like. And I can see yours.

Is that a feature, I guess, within B.I? Like, can you say, oh, I want these three? Or is that like randomly generated the recommendations by Beehive after looking at like the people that subscribe to you? So you pick the ones that you want on there. But like if you know another newsletter or know the other rider, like I've got like essentially

cross recommendations set up with like 10 other newsletters. But you can also go in and just search on Beehive for finance newsletters or travel or crypto, this or that and like find a newsletter the rights about that topic. And then you can reach out to whoever runs that to see if they want to like recommend each other. So you pick the ones that you want to recommend, but it's very easy to search for newsletters like to recommend. And if you had to.

to give anybody advice, I guess, for wanting to start working remotely and waiting on the internet for money. Where do you think is like the first place they should start? I think the first thing is just like publish your first piece. There's definitely this whole thing now. I call it like productivity porn, but people get so like jacked up on trying to plan everything outright and then listening to podcasts and taking courses and like developing all these mental models for how to do stuff. But in reality, it's like writing stuff, telling everybody about it in real life and on the internet, and then it's probably terrible. And then you just do it over and again until it gets better. So I would definitely say publish on B-Ive because I use it and I love it.

But pretty much everything, like if you're actually going to try to write on the internet and make money from it, you just have to write a lot of stuff on the internet and not make any money from it from a long time. And then like most people either, most people just drop out because they get tired of it. That's probably 90% of people. If you can stick it out for a year plus, like you tend to just you figure it out from there. Yeah, it's like analysis paralysis. Like there's so much stuff that you can analyze that you're just like kind of freeze in place.

Yeah. And it's so funny that you say like productivity porn because the first thing I thought of was this one YouTuber name, Ali something. And he makes a bunch of minimalism and productivity YouTube videos. And he has like an iPad and uses like 70 million different apps. And like it's so interesting to me. And I love watching the videos. But I'm like, I had that much stuff going on.

Like I have a paper to do list. and my Google calendar. Yeah. And then here and there, I have, like, depending on the task, I have a notion sheet or Google sheet. That's it.

Like, I feel like the more tools I, like, get thrown into my, uh, into like my workflow, the less stuff I end up putting out. Yeah.

Same. I literally write everything in Beehive. If I'm like on a point, you write it in Beehive. You don't even write it on a Google Doc course. Just write the whole thing in Beehive. I've never used a Google Doc for it. Is it saved?

Like, because it's grammarly works on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gramily works on it. Okay. same as like in the drafts. And then if like if I'm offline like on like if I'm on a flight or like

somewhere like in the car and I don't have Wi-Fi, then I'll either write in like an offline Google doc or like a word doc. But if I have an internet connection, I just write in Beehive. So you're like a Beehive. Stan. You are. You are easily breathing. Was that like the first place I guess that you started writing on? Because they're fairly new. So I started on Substack. Beehive didn't exist at that time. Like June of last year. And then started talking to liquidity. He had been talking to Tyler Dink, who's the CEO of Beehive, about, like, I don't remember what platform exec someone was on before this, but I came on like right when we switched to B-Ive. So I think this is the first newsletter on it. So I started writing on it. And

then two months later, it was like New Year's and I just decided to move all my stuff there because it was just easier having everything in one spot. Like I could just cycle through like all the newsletters and blogs and stuff. But yeah, I've been on B-Hives since like day one. Oh my gosh. That's kind of crazy. It's been really cool seeing it just grow, honestly, because one of the first newsletters I subscribed to you that was on Beehive was liquidity. That might have actually been the first one I applied, or I subscribed to actually now that I think about it.

But I didn't realize until I did some further digging that it was ex-morning group people. And after that, I have a friend of the podcast, actually, who came on this week and start another ex-morning group person named Josh Kaplan, on smooth media and they've run a few newsletters all on Pio Hype as well. And I'm like, these people are taking over. Like, it's super interesting. As far, I know this is probably going into your like productivity point thing. But I'm always so interested like on how people break up the, um, the newsletters themselves.

Like exact some obviously has like you said. Um, like it goes through and talks about deals that happened and things like that. When did that become like something that's solid for you? Or is this stuff when you put one out? is it just one story, no extra segments? So with exact sum, it's like, it's a formula. We have what happened in the markets, earnings, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital. We have an ad.

We have memes. Like, it's a formula that we plug in every day based on the news. With young money, it's like just whatever thing I've been thinking about. I'll write about it. I have a backlog. Like, I do use Notion as well. I have a backlog of like 70 writing ideas on Notion that are just like, if I need something to plug in, I go with that.

but there's usually like all this FTX stuff happened and I have like 20 ideas off of that. So usually whatever ideas on the top of my head, I'll just start writing about it. And maybe like I finished the piece for Tuesday on Friday just because like all this stuff was happening last week and I just had some ideas that hit. Like the one I'm putting out Tuesday, I'm relating the main dude from I'm legend, the book, not the movie to Sam Bateman Fried or Friday or whatever. And which doesn't seem to make sense for an analogy, but like it actually makes a lot of sense. It's the way I wrote it.

But, like, I'll just have an idea and start writing about it and then it's done. And sometimes I write that the day before or I'm up until, like, 5 a.m. the night before. And the other times I finish, like, a week early and just schedule it. Yeah. So totally just depends. Yeah. I really think the thing was because I started really writing all this stuff at the same time

that I was just kind of on a four-month bender in Europe, like, just on trains and living out of hostels and stuff. I, like, started riding in a pretty chaotic environment. So now I'm just used to writing stuff at really random times. I mean, juggling business school must be kind of difficult. Is this something you do? Like, first thing when you wake up in the morning, you write? Or like, where do you find the time in your death?

Just whatever. Like yesterday, I was at a coffee shop for like five hours, just writing stuff. Probably not going to write that much today because I'm already done with my piece for tomorrow. Yeah. Sometime tomorrow, it might be first thing in the morning or I might go to the gym and do it afterwards. Or like, I might be sitting in accounting class like with a word dot pulled out, pretending to be in class. I don't, I have no, like, people talk about having set times to write.

I just like, you just right. I just incorporate it into my day. Okay. That makes, I can see that. I feel like you also have a lot of stuff on your plate with writing. So for me, I feel like I have to wake up first thing. Like, first thing I do is I go on a walk. Like I say it's like my screen free time or I go to the gym and like no, no screens, right?

And then I hit like tech meme and like all the newsletters and I sort out like which stories are like my favorite the stories that are good for the day because they think that's like when I'm my freshest. Like I don't know if I could write news for the. the show or we have a daily newsletter this weekend startups too. I don't know if I can write that like super late at night. I think I'd have to be super fresh in the morning. Yeah, I, I wake up, look at Twitter for like 20 minutes, doom scroll. Like whatever's the opposite of how you're supposed to go about doing stuff. I know screen time in the morning. I like, I live a really unhealthy life

becomes pretty much all of that, I think. You're probably like really in tune though with what's happening. Yeah, no, for sure. I'm like, I am terminally online. My screen time on Twitter is like two hours a day. It's not great. Oh, Mike's probably up there. That's just on my phone. That doesn't include laptop. No, yeah. It's bad.

Okay. So last question. You're in business school, like you said, now, which is so sick. Columbia is an amazing, amazing university. Where do you see yourself after college? What are you going to be pursuing? Probably writing a blog and running a newsletter. That's about it.

I think I'm the only guy in my business school that just plans of writing a blog. But that leads to the question, then why are you even in business school if you just want to write a blog, which is a really. which is a really good question that I've gotten like a hundred times now. If I hadn't gotten into Columbia back in 2019 when I thought the highest purpose in life was to create shareholder value and I wanted to go work and consulting, I probably would have just done my old job. Or no, like if none of the writing thing had happened, that's what I would have done. And then the writing thing did happen. So, but because I was already in Columbia, I was sitting there thinking, okay, does it still make sense to go considering that I'm already in?

And for me, like, there's still a lot of value in like the prestige and pedigree from it. But also, like, it's the cliche, the network of it. But to people who aren't like online, if you see somebody has an NBA from Columbia, it still adds like a little bads to them. But beyond that, like it gave me, we have 700 kids in my class. Wow. And it gave me like a pretty good network of a lot of people around my age in their mid-late 20s. They're probably going to be really successful and do a lot of interesting stuff. But they're also very fun people to hang out with.

So I can either move to New York or I know three people, most of my friends that, like, friends that I know up here are people that I met through Twitter or whatever or kind of supercharged that network through business school and then have any opportunities that come off of that. So it still made sense. Or at least that's how I rationalized it in my head because I was already in. But I've enjoyed it so far. Well, I'm sure the blog after it's going to be even more interesting. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And then you're going to have all that time on your hands so you can make this thing like daily.

Yep. Yeah. I don't want to write. I just want to write a blog. Like, I can, the whole, I actually hate the business side of writing. Like, if I could just write stuff and money would just appear, that'd be great. And I guess you can do that if you have paid subscribers, but then, like, less people can read your stuff. Yeah.

So it's really-gated content is like a big question. So you're up somebody that's like pro ads. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. We had a producer, Justin, who is a former producer on the show, he used to have some qualms with gated, gated content. He's like, oh, come on. This is just information. Yep.

But yeah, super excited to see where you're going. Like I said, big fan of a newsletter. Can we wait to keep seeing your travel blogs, too? That's going to be really fun one. Yeah, very awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Awesome.

All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. We made it through the week. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. We will be doing another great D.C. Sunday school and a climate startup. Can't wait to see you on Sunday. It's going to be great. See you then. Enjoy your Saturday. Enjoy your one day off, people. Take your one day off. Enjoy it. Rest up. Bye-bye.